The Ukrainian Oral History Association invites you to the opening webinar of its anniversary series, featuring Gelinada Grinchenko, Co-Chair of the UOHA. Her talk, “About Kharkiv and About Myself”: How Oral Histories Became a Film,” explores how oral history transforms into visual storytelling.
How does oral testimony take shape on screen? What interpretive, ethical, and aesthetic challenges arise when historians become screenwriters and oral accounts become film material? How does the research process evolve when the witness’s voice leaves the archive to “speak” through the screen, creating a new form of collective memory?
The webinar focuses on the making of the documentary “About Kharkiv and About Myself” – a large-scale oral history project based on the testimonies of Kharkiv residents who lived through the Nazi occupation of 1941–1943. Together, we will discuss how interviews are transformed into scripts and scenes, how filmmaking reshapes the perspectives of both researcher and viewer, and how audiovisual testimony contributes to contemporary memory culture.
The film consists of four parts:
The Beginning of the War and the Occupation – how Kharkiv met the war and what it meant to live under occupation.
The Persecution of the City’s Jews – the tragedy of the Holocaust, the Kharkiv ghetto, Drobytskyi Yar, and stories of rescue and trauma.
Everyday Life under Occupation – survival, fear, hope, and the search for humanity in inhuman conditions.
Liberation and the End of the War – the city’s post-liberation experiences, returns, new losses, and the start of rebuilding.
During the webinar, two of the film’s four episodes will be screened, followed by a discussion on how oral history, cinematic language, and memory intersect in shaping a contemporary visual narrative of the past.
Don’t miss the opening event of UOHA’s anniversary webinar series – a space where research, ethics, and the art of memory come together.
Speaker: Gelinada Grinchenko
Gelinada Grinchenko is a Senior Researcher at the Department of History of Eastern and Southeastern Europe at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich; Professor at the Department of World History at Oles Honchar Dnipro National University; Co-Head of Ukrainian Oral History Association; Co-Head of the German-Ukrainian Historians Commission; Editor-in-Chief of the Ukrainian based academic peer-reviewed journal Ukraina Moderna. Her main areas of interest are oral history, the history and memory of WWII, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Memory Studies.
Date: November 27, 2025
Time: 19:00 (Kyiv time)
Conference ID: 630 2517 0671